Brian Viner: Sports books perfect when you are sitting comfortably

It's always good to have the Rothmans Football Yearbook at hand

Our friends Claire and Bill came to stay with us a few weekends ago. And Claire was responsible for a devastating one-liner one morning while Bill was doing the washing-up. She asked him to attend to something else, I forget what. "I can't do two things at the same time," he protested. "Yes, you can, you can poo and read," she said, tartly.

Maybe you had to be there, but we laughed a lot at the time, the women longer and louder than the men. Because reading on the loo seems to be a boy thing. I don't know why this should be, but I do know of an ailment peculiar to men whereby they actually find it hard to open their bowels without the accompaniment of a good book. You probably don't want to start the week with an insight into my toiletary habits, but I confess it is a problem I suffer from myself.

We have three toilets in our house (I know somebody with five, who rather wittily named their house St Cloud, pronounced the French way, cinq loo) and by each of them I keep two books, one for short-stay parking, as it were, the other for long-stay. And in each case one of the pair has to be about sport.

There, you were probably wondering when I'd get round to mentioning sport, and I do apologise for getting bogged down in toilets, but I never can tell how this column is going to unfold.

The point I'm slowly getting at is that I have done some of my most enjoyable reading on sport while perched on the toilet. Of course, the books have to be chosen carefully. I once made the mistake of sitting down with The Encyclopaedia of World Tennis and found it frustratingly unwieldy. But it's always good to have the Rothmans Football Yearbook at hand, ditto any edition of Wisden, and P G Wodehouse's Golf Omnibus is perfect, there often being time, as long as nobody needs you with any urgency, to read one of his exquisitely-crafted stories in its entirety.

At the moment, beside my favourite loo, where I daily spend some real quality time, I have the Collected Poems of Philip Larkin, and McIlvanney on Football. One, a grumpy old bugger with a marvellous facility with words, the other a dead poet.

Only kidding. I don't know Hugh McIlvanney nearly well enough to be cheeky about him, but there has to be some downside to having your book enthusiastically plugged by an envious fellow-hack. There is a glowing review on the back, which says: "All football writers should keep this book by their sides in case the magic rubs off." Substitute the word "sides" with the word "khazis" and I'd say that's about right.

Anyway, there I was last week, closeted with McIlvanney on Football while on the other side of the firmly-locked door my wife tried to get the children ready for school (there are times, I readily concede, when my bookishness in the loo does not necessarily serve the best interests of the household), when I realised that the article I was reading, about the emergence of an exciting new crop of youngsters at Manchester United, had been published exactly 10 years earlier, to the very day.

Of those youngsters – who included David Beckham, Gary Neville, Nicky Butt, Paul Scholes and "Robert" Savage – only one, a painfully shy kid from Belfast called Keith Gillespie, had yet started a first-team match. But the 36-year-old Bryan Robson, coming to the end of his glorious playing career at United, told McIlvanney that he had great hopes for all of them.

"I will be amazed if Gary Neville does not make an absolutely top player," said Robson, presciently, adding, less presciently, that "Gary's brother Phil is just turning 16 and has a marvellous build for his age, so he looks like having the physical authority he needs to go with his superb skills and could easily turn out to be the best of all these lads".

As for Sir Alex Ferguson, as he then wasn't, the player he most fancied 10 years ago was Scholes ("Paul has everything," says Ferguson in a low, charged voice that identifies this player as his No 1 bet to make a lasting impact). Yet, poignantly, there were as many hugely promising youngsters who did not fulfil the prophecies made for them, whether through injury or because they just couldn't hack it at the highest level. Robson enthused as much about Ben Thornley, Chris Casper and John O'Kane as about Beckham, Butt and Scholes. "And he is as close to lyrical as he can be," McIlvanney wrote, "when he discusses the first-year apprentice Richard Irving from Halifax, a boy he regards as the perfect partner for Scholes at the front."

I wonder whether Richard Irving was watching the Worthington Cup final yesterday, reflecting perhaps on his own disappeared dreams, as the class of '93 saw their dreams of a treble go down the pan.

b.viner@independent.co.uk